We arrived to glorious sunshine and to find ourselves the first guests in the brand new accommodation here at PGL. Lucky us!

Our first day at PGL and all three groups competed to create a raft that would stay afloat the longest! For this task, Mrs Hobson’s group were the winners (as their raft managed to stay together for longer) but only by a very small margin. In fact each group’s raft eventually fell apart or became unbalanced and everyone (to their great delight) became wet. The area surrounding the lake rang with our laughter.

Our wet clothes adorn the front of our accommodation which I hope will dry before our return!

Tonight, we all enjoyed the camp fire where we toasted marshmallows on the fire to create smores, sang songs, shared stories, jokes and other talents!

This has been an extraordinarily busy term. We have had many highlights. The children really enjoyed learning about Lent and Shrove Tuesday with Mrs Clark, in her informative assembly, followed by an exciting inter-house pancake race in the playground. Well done to green house the worthy winners and expert pancake flippers.

Book week began with a launch assembly where all the teachers dressed up as crayons and presented the story ‘The day the crayons quit’, much to the delight of the whole school. This inspired some lovely writing later in the day which can be seen on the board outside Year 5. We enjoyed our daily poem and the visit by the author Catherine Doyle. Many of us (including me) are now reading the book ‘The Storm Keeper’s Island’ and thoroughly enjoying it. We hope she remembers to send us some chapters of her next novel to read (which is yet to be published).

For homework last week, we explained that we were entering the Primary Leaders Award by inventing something to help solve an everyday problem. Using their many impressive ideas, we wrote persuasive pitch letters to accompany our designs. Mrs Casewell will now send our superb letters to the engineering team at the University of London and we will wait to see if they wish to take any of our designs further. So many of the solutions were useful ideas to solve every day problems or to help our environment. I particularly liked the design to stop you eating when you were full!

We have been incredibly lucky to be treated to two science related visits. The first a science show at Sevenoaks School – It’s only water or is it? The second this week, when we took part in experiments to discover the amount of vitamin C in the foods we eat. Thank you to the Walthamstow Hall lower sixth chemists who prepared and guided us through the various experiments in their laboratories.

Prom Praise for Schools telling the story of ‘The Exodus’ through music, song and dance has to be the highlight of the term for Year 5. How lucky we were to be invited to the Royal Albert Hall to participate as part of the massed choir. The experience was both intimate and unforgettable. We returned to school after the event with some very happy and very tired children! Thank you Mrs Clark for organising this and Mrs Hughes for teaching us the songs.

Finally, it was lovely to see you and discuss your children at parents evening. I would like to say a big thank you to you all for all the support and encouragement you always give your children, especially during our recent Book Week, invention homework and Prom Praise.

Welcome Maths Enthusiasts. I have entered the whole school into a Sumdog competition against other schools.

All you need to do is log onto Sumdog with your usual username and password then enter the school code sjs3 to help us gain as many points as possible. The competition started today and ends next Friday 14th February at 8am.

How do you earn St John’s some points? Simply play! The more you play the more we earn.

We are currently nearing the end of our work in Literacy on the old English poem Beowulf (although we are reading Michael Morpurgo’s version). Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, comes to the aid of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall in Heorot has been under attack by a monster known as Grendel. This week we have written prayers to keep us safe as we battle the monster; wrote home to our loved ones and begun planning our narrative of the fight scene and conclusion to the story. Beware next week, you may well be hearing lots of description of the destruction of this death-dealing monster!

Here is a photo of our decorated prayers and an example of the prayers we wrote.

In maths we have been exploring geometry, particularly the calculation of the perimeter and area of rectangles, composite and irregular shapes. We began by creating the shapes and then drawing them and finally, this week, changing the scale.

Earth and space is our mission for science so we have been investigating the planets in our universe. This week, we used fruit to understand the relative sizes of the planets compared to each other with Mercury as a peppercorn and Jupiter as a melon. We have learned the order of the planets from the sun by creating our own mnemonic such as

Our geography topic is the UK and using our prior knowledge, maps and atlases, we have identified the counties, many cities and discussed the different areas of the UK. Therefore our art topic links with our learning and is about cityscapes. We are working towards creating cityscapes of different cities around the UK. To begin, we are looking at the different techniques that will create a 3D image for our cityscape. This week we looked at the colourful work of pop art, cityscape artist, Charles Fazzino and his layering techniques. Here is one of our examples.

Thank you for reading with your children and continuing to support them to complete their homework and learn their spellings and times tables.

With Christmas on the horizon, we continue to enjoy lots of different learning experiences throughout the curriculum. Here are a few of our highlights in year 5. We continue to learn about the Tudors during our history lessons and this week we investigated the reign of Edward VI. After much discussion about this boy-king, we wrote a diary account as Edward expressing how we felt about his illness and his inability to reign as a true king. Please see one the diary accounts below.

The Viewer by Shaun Tan and Gary Crew has been the focus of our English lessons. This is a dark tale of a young boy who discovers ‘a viewer’ which transports him to a world of fascination and dread. As the ending of this book is fairly open-ended, we have written some of our own endings which have been very inventive. Look at the vocabulary we have gained from this book.

In science, we have completed our topic on forces. We thoroughly enjoyed Drastic Plastic day when we wrote persuasive letters to Tesco in Riverhead asking them to reduce their use of plastics. We are still hoping for a reply. Now, we are learning about the properties and changes of materials. This week we undertook a very important experiment – to discover which type of material kept a cup of tea warmer for longer. Please ask your child to tell you what they discovered during their investigation.

We then took the results that we had recorded during the experiment and used these to draw line graphs and write our conclusions. This was a cross-curricular skill as we have been learning about line graphs in statistics in our maths lessons.

Building on our forces knowledge, Mr Grobel will be undertaking a DT glider project with the children on Fridays until Christmas. I hope to be able to show you the results in our next blog.

On Wednesday 14th November, the St. John’s tables tennis squad competed in the Kent School Games. We entered two teams and each team played with the usual St. John’s balance of gritty determination and keen sportsmanship. Despite valiant efforts in the group round, the B team played magnificently coming away with a draw and a loss. The A team managed to win all their games in the group stage and went on to the final against Amherst. In the end, Amherst were too strong for St. John’s claiming an 8:0 victory giving us silver medal position. The competition gave the squad an opportunity to play at a higher level and compete against other schools from across Kent. They tell me they have learnt a lot from the experience which is so good to hear. We were complimented several times on our positivity and attitude to sport. Thank you to Georgia who supported us and helped with scoring.

Well done to all. I hope you are inspired to play more table tennis and even consider playing for a club outside school. If you would like to know more details about how to do this, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me.

Thank you very much to everyone who attended the ‘Meet the Teacher’ on Wednesday afternoon, it was lovely to meet you all and place a child to a parent! At the bottom of this blog is a link for you to click on to get a copy of the information I gave out (hopefully you will already have received a copy in your child’s book bag).

Our history topic this term is the Tudors and we are combining this with our literacy too. So far we have learnt all about the battle of Bosworth and the reign of Henry VII. Look at our amazing newspaper reports of the battle.

On Monday we will be visiting Knole House to dress up in period costume and discover more facts about this period in our history through artefacts and paintings.

In maths we have begun our place value learning journey and have even learnt Roman numerals. Perhaps you could ask your child to show you the date written in Roman numerals!

Forces is our science topic which we have commenced by looking at air resistance and in RE we are asking the question ‘What does it mean if God is holy and loving?’

Please try to ensure that your child reads for 15-20 minutes each day and if possible that you also read to them, even reading and discussing an article in the newspaper is a very valuable exercise in vocabulary, grammar and comprehension.

Congratulations to the children who represented St. John’s at the cricket tournament on Friday 8th June at Sevenoaks School.

After our promotion last season, we faced some stiff opposition in the form of Amherst, who were the eventual runners up, and Sevenoaks Primary School.

We played well and made significant improvements throughout the matches. Despite not coming away with a win, the children played with determination, a positive attitude and commitment. It was great to hear their encouraging comments to each other and their enthusiasm for the game.

Thanks go again to Mr Edward Oatley who supported, coached and encouraged the children throughout. Thank you too to the parents, relatives and friends who came to support the team. It was wonderful to see such support for our pupils. We hope to play again in this tournament when the current pupils will be Year 6 and a year older with more experience, ready to play their best and do battle on the pitch!

I hope that this little taster will inspire all of the children who have had limited exposure to cricket, to pick up a bat and ball and play more of this wonderful game!

St. John’s were certainly up for a little bit of cricket today! With the sun shining down on us and with not a cloud in the sky – yes very hot actually- we gathered at Otford to play in the annual Sevenoaks cricket festival.

Twelve keen cricketers supported each other throughout the whole competition, encouraging team mates and playing to the best of their ability. The competition was tough and we certainly had some challenging matches. Despite not coming away with a win, we were victorious in our spirit, enthusiasm and approach to the game. I am so truly proud of our fabulous Year 5s. I can honestly say that I have never seen such a lovely group of resilient pupils who persevered and remained positive to the very end. Well done to all.

Thank you too to Mr Oatley who supported us, giving the children coaching tips and encouragement throughout. Also to Mrs Loftin who brought along the choc ices – so very needed – and to all our amazing parents, brothers and sisters (and new puppy) who came to support us all.

We really are a great school with such a wonderful community. Thank you again.